Review: By Dagger or Talon

Rating:

Tomorrow’s War is my favourite set of Sci-Fi skirmish rules. Although they do contain some guidelines for creating stats for Aliens, they are primarily concerned with ‘hard’ sci-fi battles between human protagonists. By Dagger Or Talon is a supplement that introduces advanced rules for creating alien races for Tomorrow’s War, but also uses these guidelines as an example to introduce a number of races into the ‘Tomorrowverse’ as it details the attack of the alien Darghaur on the colony of Glory and the first Darghaur War.

As well as detailing all aspects of creating alien races for use with Tomorrow’s War, this supplement also looks at how a player may create unique Special Forces units to fight the new alien threat.

So, whilst you can create an alien race by answering a series of questions (How do the move? What tech level are they? What weapons do they use? How are their forces organised?) and possibly using an archetype (anthropomorphic, robotic, intangible) you can then use a very similar process to create Special Forces to oppose them.

As such, this book provides not only a number of ready-made forces for use with Tomorrow’s War (many of which have figures already created by Ground Zero Games) but also provides a very useful toolkit for creating any sort of forces for sci-fi games – not just Tomorrow’s War. The toolkit is governed by one overriding rule: does it make sense?

Following the toolkit for creating aliens and special forces, plus the worked examples of new races, vehicles and weapons, the supplement ends with nine different scenarios, which although they are based in the battle for the Glory colony, can easily be adapted for use in any game system.

Whilst not essential for Tomorrow’s War, By Dagger Or Talon is a very good additional resource, and has a toolkit which can be used by any game designer when thinking about how to design new forces for games. Obviously, it’s a must if you want to use the new forces of the ‘Tomorrowverse’ in your games.

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